Moving on

You know that feeling that dogs you for years - that maybe you'd be happier doing something else, that perhaps the amount of anxiety and stress you're carrying around with you every day isn't just unhealthy for you, but for your family too... that perhaps that feeling extends to everyone but a collective decision to simply struggle with it and carry on is probably not the best thing?

For various reasons, most of then consequential, I reached a stage where I realised that the weight of anxiety I have been carrying around could not continue. I had a particularly bad couple of months, in which things really hit Peak Stress and I've decided that rather than have a brief break, then jump back in to the fray of deliberately putting myself in to anxiety inducing positions, I am very deliberately hitting the reset button.

There's a lot to explain, and I'm finding writing this down that I have been so out of the habit of putting things publicly that I'm feeling a bit shy of writing a huge long piece explaining everything all at once. So over the course of this week I'll try and get everything down. In some ways it's quite simple: I'm now training to be an Alexander Technique teacher. But short and tight as that statement is, it definitely needs explaining and contextualising (in order to answer the reply "I'm sorry, what?!"). I also need to flag that I will also be working part time in the interwebs for the foreseeable, partly through ££ but also because it's... irresistible, isn't it. And it's the thing What I Do.

So stay tuned for more explanation and thinking and I hope, a few posts a week about my experiences in classes, which are at the moment fascinating and new enough to rant on about for ages, in a way that I am hoping will be interesting - give that we've all got anatomy and bone structure - that is to say, at least a reasonable percentage of those of us reading this blog post will be, for the time being, human - so my discoveries as I learn may be useful ;)

Meanwhile the world turns. Yemen starves, Syrian children are killed, Trump... oh bloody hell, Trump... it's fair to say that some of my ongoing anxiety problems come from being engaged with political human activity on a global level and feeling more frightened for our immediate future than I was, say, a year and a half ago. When I woke at 5am after a brief sleep, the morning after the Brexit referendum about 3 seconds after looking at my phone I burst in to tears. I am pursuing an Irish passport and the kids will have Irish citizenship, My daughter's doing very well at German but the Brexit vote in the UK was just one aspect of the terrible right turn that seems to be overcoming so many countries in 'the west'. In countries where the education system has let its citizens down, in particular, it feels like, there is an increase in fear, an increase in xenophobia and an increase in visible, confident racism and violence which not only makes my stomach turn, but fills me with foreboding. I want no part of it. I disown it.

So, I have no doubt there will be more political stress-talk but as importantly, and perhaps, more optimistically, the story of everything changing.